Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media with Semi-Supervised Learning.

TitleSuicide Risk Assessment on Social Media with Semi-Supervised Learning.
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2024
AuthorsLovitt M, Ma H, Wang S, Peng Y
JournalProc IEEE Int Conf Big Data
Volume2024
Pagination8541-8549
Date Published2024 Dec
ISSN2639-1589
Abstract

With social media communities increasingly becoming places where suicidal individuals post and congregate, natural language processing presents an exciting avenue for the development of automated suicide risk assessment systems. However, past efforts suffer from a lack of labeled data and class imbalances within the available labeled data. To accommodate this task's imperfect data landscape, we propose a semi-supervised framework that leverages labeled (n=500) and unlabeled (n=1,500) data and expands upon the self-training algorithm with a novel pseudo-label acquisition process designed to handle imbalanced datasets. To further ensure pseudo-label quality, we manually verify a subset of the pseudo-labeled data that was not predicted unanimously across multiple trials of pseudo-label generation. We test various models to serve as the backbone for this framework, ultimately deciding that RoBERTa performs the best. Ultimately, by leveraging partially validated pseudo-labeled data in addition to ground-truth labeled data, we substantially improve our model's ability to assess suicide risk from social media posts.

DOI10.1109/bigdata62323.2024.10825422
Alternate JournalProc IEEE Int Conf Big Data
PubMed ID39896202
PubMed Central IDPMC11786971
Grant ListOT2 OD032581 / OD / NIH HHS / United States